visual learning

Late yesterday afternoon my Foldables rampage across the internet led to something good: I now possess a starter sense of "visual learning" and what its place in school may be. This is something I've puzzled over for ages, partly because of research Temple and I cited in Animals in Translation concerning verbal overshadowing. Verbal overshadowing is a conflict between visual and verbal representations in memory:

A series of laboratory studies found that memories for a mock criminal's face were much poorer among eyewitnesses who had described what the perpetrator looked like shortly after seeing him, compared with those who hadn't.
source:
Words Get in the Way
by Bruce Bower
Science News
Week of April 19, 2003; Vol. 163, No. 16, p. 250

Temple divides the world into visual and verbal thinkers and from one angle the verbal overshadowing studies seem to say she's right. (I have no doubt she's onto something - Temple really does think in pictures.)

At the same time, probably most of us have the sense that visual memory is more durable than verbal memory no matter what kind of thinkers we are, which is why Ms. Peacock tells her students to form a mental image of the word "vex." She's right: a mental image should allow all of them to remember the word the next time they see it, not just the "visual learners."

Which brings to mind a story. I once went to a friend's 40th birthday party where I didn't know a soul. At the time I'd just finished reading a book on memory so I formed mnemonic images of the names of every person to whom I was introduced -- and then I remembered every name. I was remembering names so accurately that it turned into a party trick; people were gathering 'round to watch me remember names. As well they should have. It was quite a feat.

So: verbal overshadowing on the one hand; mnemonic devices on the other.

I have no idea how these two ideas fit together. Perhaps visual images help memory for verbal material but verbal representations hurt memory for visual material? Don't know.

Don't know and am not going to spend today tracking down the people do know. Here's the post I wrote early yesterday evening:


Karen H pointed me to the Eide Neurloearning blog awhile back:

Several years ago, we experienced an epiphany while meeting with an obviously intelligent blind woman with a thirty-year history of diabetes. "There's probably nothing you can do," she started off saying, "but I still need to ask you if there's anything I can do about my memory. It's gotten so bad now that I'll forget what my daughter's telling me even before she's finished talking." Uh-oh, we thought, sounds bad. We had seen her brain scan before, and it had clearly shown diffuse damage from poorly controlled diabetes. Maybe there was nothing we could do.

We asked her to try to remember a list of numbers, and found to our dismay that she struggled to remember even 2 in a row. When asked to reverse them, she couldn't even keep the second number in mind. It looked pretty hopeless. Words of reassurance seemed empty.

But then we thought of something. We had recently seen an fMRI study which had shown that 'visual imagination' (visually imagining reversing a checkerboard) had a very diffuse distribution in the brain - and thought maybe enough of it could be preserved in this woman so that visual imagery could be used bypass her memory impairments. To our surprise and to hers, when prompted to visually imagine the numbers we read to her, she could now remember 7 digits (the normal limit)! ... [S]he merely needed to be made aware that she should translate 'heard' information into visual images - to go from being totally incapacitated memory-wise to 'normal'.

The fact that public schools are preoccupied with visual learning however defined^* reminds me of Horace Mann deciding that hearing children should be taught to read the same way deaf children were taught. High school students have young, healthy brains; they don't need to assign a distinct visual image to each and every unfamiliar vocabulary word they encounter while reading a play by Shakespeare. Not unless they've got diffuse brain damage, which by the time they've spent 16 years playing video games at home and folding Foldables at school, they may have.

The fastest way to teach vocabulary -- I'm pretty sure I'm right about this -- would probably be to produce a "Saxon Math" for prose: a sequence of textbooks with interesting short passages offering distributed practice in the vocabulary to be learned each school year, including homework sets that require students to -- yes -- write sentences using the words.

Based in my own experience as an obsessive child reader, I can tell you that it's possible to acquire a large vocabulary from voracious reading alone. However, no school (or parent) can require students to read obsessively, nor would we want them to. So we need textbooks that go some ways toward distilling and duplicating the critical elements of the natural born bookworm's reading habits; we need quality reading over quantity.

I continue to think Vocabulary Workshop probably does this, by the way. Just wish we were getting through the books faster. C. has spent 2 years on the first book in the series -- Level A -- and still isn't finished. (We continue to plug away at Megawords; we're midway through Book 5 now, with 3 to go.)


visual learning - the books to read

Having poked around Eideneurolearning a bit on the same day that I went looking for a Jeffrey Zacks paper on event segmentation, I've gleaned the following nuggets & reading recommendations:

• a combination of text with images probably always produces better "retention" - i.e., we remember the material better later on (not sure whether the people who study these things also believe we understand the material better - I think they do)
  
• animations are probably a bad idea; stills are preferable
• the seminal book on the relationship between words and pictures is: Mental representations: a dual coding approach by Allan Paivio
  
• the best book on dual coding as it applies to education is Richard Mayer's Multi-Media Learning
  

I'm sorely tempted to buy both of these books, which can be previewed on Google Book Search, but first I'm going to read all of the Eide posts on visual learning.







^{*I've seen it defined as "prefers reading to listening"}


visual learning

foldables
why lawyers burn out
Independent George re: foldables
your tax dollars at work part 2
my busy day
not your father's formative assessment
remembering key concepts in math with foldables
south of the border
Steve H and palisadesk on foldables
homeschooling convention: no foldables

you may have to hit refresh a couple of times to load these pages:
21st century skills in Singapore
the master plan
horselaughs are heard in Singapore
more horselaughs in Singapore